93 Comments

David

So some junior lefty journalist has a reminder of what an opposition should look like after 9 years of ineffectiveness, probably a Green supporter looking on in horror at what is unfolding and deflecting.

PDB

robertguyton

No junior. The editorial is spot on and reflects the growing awareness amongst the public of National’s petulance; the latest polls showed the direction their support is going – downwards. This ongoing brattiness is causing them great harm. You are fools to bray in their defence.

PDB

‘Polls’, or a single Roy Morgan poll that only shows the 10% average bounce in support a new NZ govt receives didn’t occur for this govt which only got a 6% increase?

No doubt in your protective bubble on the standard you are shielded from how poorly this new govt has begun. Business confidence only remains high because the new govt have backtracked on the majority of their election promises and haven’t actually changed anything yet that National was already doing.

PDB

robertguyton

Turns out Key was lying /sarc
“With days to go until voting in 2014, Key found himself accused by some of the world’s most high-profile and outspoken surveillance critics of secretly developing a mass surveillance system with the United States’ National Security Agency.

It was high stakes for Key, also Minister of the GCSB, as he had previously promised the public he would resign as Prime Minister if there was ever mass surveillance of New Zealanders

robertguyton

Blazer

‘Sir John Key’s story of how and why he canned a “mass surveillance” programme are at odds with official papers detailing development of the “Speargun” project.

The issue blew up in the final days of the 2014 election with Key claiming the programme was long-dead and had been replaced by a benign cyber-security system called Cortex.

Key always claimed the Speargun project to tap New Zealand’s internet cable was stopped in March 2013.

But new documents show development of Speargun continued after the time he had said he ordered a halt – apparently because the scheme was “too broad”.

Instead, they show Speargun wasn’t actually stopped until after Key was told in a secret briefing that details were likely to become public because they could be in the trove of secrets taken by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.’..TS.

David

“Party leaders like me would basically get to say to individual MPs, ‘If you don’t do what I like then I’ll expel you from caucus and you’ll be kicked out of Parliament,'” says Greens co-leader Russel Norman.

Pickled Possum

duperez

In August 2016 Wellington man Losi Filipo was discharged without conviction for an October 2015 assault on four people.

That discharge without conviction was overturned in October after an appeal by police, and in October 2016 he was to nine months’ supervision and has been ordered to attend alcohol counselling, and a course on living without violence.

The initial publicity about the result of the appeal saw wide public discussion and condemnation of Filipo, Wellington and New Zealand Rugby and anyone who wrote a reference for him.

It is probably reasonable to say there was a media storm. And hysteria.

Ben Stokes, a world class English cricketer is coming to New Zealand and talk is that he could play for Canterbury. What chance the fact that there’ll be a fuss about someone involved in street violence being welcomed here and allowed to do his normal job? And Canterbury and New Zealand cricket support violence by having anything to do with him?

Or because he is a 26 year old English “doting dad of two” cricketer it’s all so different and he’s fine?

duperez

I know the circumstances are different. We believe everything Stokes says, and anyone backing him up, and believed nothing Filipo said or anyone who spoke for him. I’ll leave the double standards to others.

The signs are that the media will be fawning all over Stokes to the same extent that they pilloried anyone who even had the temerity to write a reference letter to the court about the Wellingtonian.

High Flying Duck

“…Yet a few days later Canterbury are courting an international superstar in Stokes whose own country England won’t even allow him to be involved in the opening phase of the Ashes series in Australia as police continue to work through his alleged involvement in a fight outside a Bristol nightclub two months ago.

There is still no sign of charges and they may never eventuate. We shouldn’t assume guilt but on the back of some alarming social media video the Stokes incident has been a very public case and one which English cricket authorities are taking seriously enough to have their best all-round player sit out the game’s most high-profile test series.”

“But shame on Canterbury for this shameless publicity stunt. New Zealand Cricket should take a stand and prevent this messy situation from unfolding.”

PartisanZ

“Consumption itself is a flawed motivational platform for a society” – John F Schumaker.

Best article I have read for a very long time, not surprisingly written by a retired psychology academic and New Zealander. This may go some way to explain many contemporary societal issues – e.g. note the average age of onset of ‘depression’ 30 years ago compared to today. Might provide greater depth in discussions of things like suicide …?

“According to Haidt … “People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives…once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.” Our arguments can tend to end up as “post hoc constructions made up on the fly” to justify our pre-existing position, subconsciously designed to secure our place in the team”.

I’m no great fan of Maxim Institute – yet another political lobby group peddling Think Tank sophistry – but I honestly could not fashion a better description of virtual characters like Corky and PDB.

In defense of the obvious retort “How about yourself?”, I cite my post the other day linking an article that [macro-statistically] debunks several myths about income inequality … Myths which I previously adhered to … e.g. Immigration …

PartisanZ

ps – so far so good … “Yet the strategies of modern cultural production are bent constantly towards the repression of emotion, the obsessive management of general feelings that, unchecked, might expose two great unspoken truths. The first is that much of modern life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly frightening. [Stress full] Acknowledging this openly allows for a second truth, more dangerous in the scope of its possibility: that it might not have to be this way”.

PartisanZ

High Flying Duck

Parti – here is another article with a slightly different, but very complementary view of society:

“By dopamine economy, I mean this. We’ve gone beyond creating “consumers” — that was the mad men did: today, we’ve created addicts of the algorithm. People who desperately check their smartphones hundreds of times a day, whose fixated eyes never leave screens, who obsessively-compulsively spend more time in fantasylands than with their families, chasing the breathtaking adrenalin high of dopaminergic release. It’s a model of what it means to human, an institutional form, where people desperately seek ever higher and quicker and sharper highs, and find lower and harsher and darker lows. But is it good for us, let alone them?”

PartisanZ

High Flying Duck

Not sure what you mean there Parti – the article focuses on the consumerism focus of today’s society as the basis of all ills. It mentions such concepts as “demoralization is a generalized loss of credibility in the assumptions that ground our existence and guide our actions”, but sheets it back to basically free market ideology.
I would argue the breakdown of social structures and frameworks – family, gender identity, duty and belonging to cultural groups is just as much, if not more, to blame.
This is borne out by the age at which depression symptoms are now appearing – well before the consumerism mindset would impact.

High Flying Duck

To be clear I’m not advocating for a return to rigid social structures and nuclear families for all. I’m just saying that the shift from such structures removes a solid framework upon which to hang your identity and understand your place in the world.
The new world is far more fluid and has no “anchor”.

Blazer

PartisanZ

Your “all ills” is a very typical what I would call ‘Rightie’ reaction (a la Maxim article), using the ‘Black or White: One or Other’ fallacy that if someone says something that does not include something else they are therefore automatically denying or opposing the ‘something else’ or the ‘other’ …

I would argue that the breakdown in social structures and frameworks is largely – please note the word ‘largely’ – the result of “the consumerism focus of today’s society” … and Schumaker explains all that …

The Right’s obsession with a Left-wing “long march through institutions” begins to look suspiciously like a cover for the Right’s own “long march to crush institutions” … perhaps inadvertently bought about by excessive consumerism …

PartisanZ

What could be more ‘consumer’ than food … much of which is more-or-less poison … that can’t be good for our digestive health? Nor can the heinously excessive stress involved in our chosen ‘disaster capitalist’ ways of producing and marketing these poisons …

High Flying Duck

A valid argument, but one I disagree with.
And I really wasn’t scoring points. I was trying to get across that I don’t see things as black and white, despite your assertion I do.
For someone professing to want reasoned debate you get very aggressive and one dimensional in your comments.
Interesting debate though.

PartisanZ

PartisanZ

“For someone professing to want reasoned debate you get very aggressive and one dimensional in your comments”

1) Check out my avatar name …

2) How about if I let you have the last ‘ad hom’ assurption [new word # 102 assertion + assumption] about another person’s character, feelings, expression and intentions – “very aggressive and one dimensional” – we then carry on with what you call “reasoned debate”?

You may be perceiving directness, forthrightness, passion and robust interchange, along with intelligence matching your own, as one-dimensional aggression?

High Flying Duck

No Parti,
I am perceiving your mis-characterisation of me as a mis-characterisation of me. That is all.
Reasoned debate requires the assumption the other party is debating in good faith. As I have said above, the article you posted raised some good points. I think you’ll find the dopamine article interesting as well.

Corky

It’s great watching two intellectual minds debate the intricacies of ‘debate.’ As a peon, I can only look on in wonderment. However, what little intellectual reserve I have, tells me, Parti will never concede to a balanced view as you have above.

Blazer

PartisanZ

@Corky – “Parti will never concede to a balanced view as you have above”

I think you say that because you and HFD are basically on the same team, a la the Maxim article. In fact I actually wrote –

“I concede that “Perhaps a bit of both is to blame” but I feel that your “breakdown in structures” is underpinned by demoralization arising from excessive consumerism …”

I do have an issue with conceding to this so-called “balanced view” when I sincerely believe one ‘side’ is actually a subset of the other … that breakdown of societal structures is a subset of excessive consumerism.

” … a narcissistic culture as one where every activity and relationship is defined by the hedonistic need to acquire the symbols of wealth … It is a culture where liberalism only exists insofar as it serves a consumer society, and even art, sex and religion lose their liberating power … [with] constant competition, there can be no allies, and little transparency. The threats to acquisitions of social symbols are so numerous, varied and frequently incomprehensible, that defensiveness, as well as competitiveness, becomes a way of life. Any real sense of community is undermined—or even destroyed—to be replaced by virtual equivalents that strive, unsuccessfully, to synthesize a sense of community”.

PartisanZ

sorethumb

Corky

Unbelievable, but true. This video ad has New Zealand Police swamped with recruitment enquiries. I bet dumbed down youngin’s think those police officers they see stopping traffic on a cold night: subduing a vicious feral or telling parents their son is dead at three am in the morning, are just actors. The ‘real’ stuff cops really get up to is shown in the ad clip.

So where were those groovy officers when Larry Williams went downtown in Auckland to purchase a hamburger, only for the shop owner to tell him Tongan protesters had made it impossible to stay open. Justice? What Justice.

Blazer

Corky

PartisanZ

“I’ve got no time for that sort of strength. Not now, not ever. Give me courage instead, the courage to remain permeable, to remain open, the potential for empathy and learning. Make me brave—I don’t care about strong” – Laurie Penny

Brilliant article posted earlier within another thread by phantom snowflake. I take the liberty of quoting and linking it again … Thanks ps.